Thursday, 10 July 2014

Food banks in Lewes, the town of Bill's breakfasts, artisan loaves
and gourmet everything? There must be some mistake... surely?

My weekly food shop (just for me – I’ve no
dependents) usually comes to about £65. It must be affordable, since I rarely
check the total as I’m clicking away filling my virtual basket. It’s hardly
decadent, despite the odd cake and bottle of beer. I’m neither a high earner
nor a compulsive eater, but I can – and do – buy enough food to satisfy my
appetite’s every whim. The weekly shop is just the start; I live in Lewes,
after all, where the culinary temptations are manifold.

Barely a weekend goes by without my splurging an
addition £20 or £30 on a meal at the Snowdrop, an Indian from Chaula’s or a
pizza (plus pudding, naturally) from Waitrose. Oh, and I buy fresh bread from
my local shop St Pancras Stores at £3.30 a pop – pricy, yes, but delicious, so
why not? That makes it at least £80 per week on food… not yet fat, not yet
broke, so no problem.

I was taken aback, therefore, to learn that some of
my neighbours, people who live just five minutes’ walk up the road, rely on food
banks to save them from going hungry. How could it be?

How could it be that people from our almost
parodically affluent town need charitable support of this most basic kind? It
was difficult for me to believe, as it is for many Lewesians, according to Pearl
Zia, manager of De Montfort food bank.

“When I was outside Waitrose [fundraising for the
food bank], people said to me, ‘We don’t have food poverty here. We have money;
we can buy our own food’. I told them that that’s not true. They just close their blinkers, and you’ve got the
poor people who are working yet don’t have money to cover the basics and are
going hungry.”

I meet with Pearl at the flat in Ousedale Close
where she runs the De Montfort food bank, the biggest of Lewes’s four food
banks – the others are Malling, Landport and the Oyster Project (the latter is
specifically for people with disabilities). De Montfort is a part of Lewes I’d
never visited or even passed through before, tucked as it is between Western
Road to the south and the tree-lined boulevard of Prince Edward’s Road to the
north (in which, incidentally, the average property price is £680,000*). Pearl
tells me that, of the 150 homes on the estate, only one is privately owned; the
rest is social housing.

De Montfort’s was the first food bank in Lewes, set
up by Pearl in December 2012. When I arrive, the ground floor flat from which
the service is run is stacked with crates, tins and packets everywhere; the
food bank has just received a large delivery from Fareshare,
a charity that collects surplus stock from supermarkets – food that would
otherwise go to waste – and delivers it to charities and community groups like
this one. Delivery man Dave tells me that he and his colleagues salvage and
redistribute 400 tonnes of food each year in the Brighton area alone (more on
food waste in Brighton and a cameo by Pearl in this Guardian piece).

What motivated Pearl to set up the food bank?

“I had a need for a food bank myself when I was in
temporary accommodation, nearly four years ago. That’s what pushed me to do it,
because I know what it’s like.”

Knowing what it’s like means understanding the reality
of finding oneself alone and at the mercy of strangers when one's life veers unexpectedly from the plan. Pearl had lived in London all her life, was earning a good
salary as a retail manager and then as a PCSO, until a marriage breakdown “and
other circumstances” left her homeless and forced her to relocate.

“I went into temporary accommodation in Brighton,
but couldn’t get housed there, so I ended up moving here. The only person I
knew was my housing officer.” The sense of isolation was short-lived; before
long Pearl was actively involved in community-improvement projects and groups,
and now speaks with great pride and fondness for her hometown. “I think now I
know more people in Lewes than people who’ve lived in Lewes all their lives.”

Pearl tells me how she sits down with each new user
of the food bank and goes through their needs so that she can package
provisions for them accordingly.

“Most of the people who come here are families with
young children, so I make sure that in each bag they have enough to make them
meals for a couple of days.”

We have not been chatting for long when Pearl’s
helpers begin to arrive – volunteers who assist with the weekly task of sorting
through the food and making up bags ready for collection. I meet Tim, former
food bank user turned helper, a big, quiet man, aged about 50, at a guess. By
way of introduction, Pearl says, “Tim was living in the woods for a couple of
years.” Tim nods but says nothing. I’m not sure how to ask, or rather where to
begin. Living in the wild for years? All year round in the open?

“Well, in a two-man tent, yes,” says Tim,
matter-of-factly. Wasn’t that horribly hard? “To start with, yes, but you get
used to it.”

Gradually more details emerge: Tim ran an army
surplus shop in Exeter which went bankrupt. He “lost everything” and ended up
trekking west to east across southern Britain surviving as best he could with
nothing except his camping equipment. Didn’t he seek help from welfare
services?

“Yeah, but you get the same answer all the time:
they say you’ve made yourself homeless so we can’t help you, plus being a
single chap you’re low priority. It was like the Spanish Inquisition; they ask
you every single thing, and make you feel like that.” He indicates tininess
with thumb and forefinger. “So I decided I wouldn’t bother anymore.”

Tim tells me how he survived by gathering dropped
or discarded coins from pavements until he had enough to afford a packet of
own-brand Rich Tea biscuits. And during cold snaps survival was even more
gruelling. “The Christmas before last, I couldn’t get out, there was about
three foot of snow, and I was in the tent, and all I had to drink was melted
snow and nothing to eat for about a week, and no heat. That wasn’t very nice.
That was pretty rough.”

While he was sleeping rough in a patch of woodland
near Plumpton, Tim was chanced upon by an inquisitive mountain biker who asked
about his circumstances. “I didn’t realise at the time, but he worked at the
council,” Tim recalls. “He said he’d bring me some food, and so he did – he
turned up the next week with a couple of tins of soup and a packet of biscuits,
and he brought me a radio, and he gave me Pearl’s details and told me to come
and see her.”

Pearl provided Tim with food and put him in touch
with the relevant people to get him re-homed and, effectively, back into
society. Tim may not be a typical food bank user, but his story is a stark
reminder of how people down on their luck easily become marginalised, and how
marginalised people easily become invisible.

The more typical way to end up at a food bank is
via a referral from an organisation or professional formally authorised to
assess need, for example, the Job Centre, a health visitor or Citizen’s Advice
Bureau. If you presumed that food banks were hubs of no-strings-attached
hand-outs, you were way off the mark, at least insofar as this one is
concerned.

That said, she is not a stickler for the rules;
exceptions are made. “If there are children involved… I won’t turn anyone away,
not if I know they’ve got young children. I don’t know if they’ve got any [food
at all] indoors; I’m not privy to their cupboards.”

Pearl Zia, founder of De Montfort food bank

I am keen to know whether demand on the De Montfort
food bank is growing, and if so, why.

“Yes, it’s gone from serving 10 people to serving
40 people a week,” says Pearl, “and also now we’ve got a mobile food bank, a
van that lets us go out and do visits to Chailey.”

Subsequently I learn that Landport and Malling food
banks have witnessed similar growth in demand. Bearing in mind that most of the
recipients have families, many with young children, it’s fair to assume that in
any given week more than 200 Lewes residents are fed by this emergency provision.
It’s a similar picture across the country; the Trussell Trust, a church
organisation that supports many of the UK’s food banks, recently reported that
the number of people receiving emergency food has risen almost 15-fold since
2010.

As I am asking
Pearl for more detail as to why so many people are finding themselves in
desperate need, she gets a fortuitously timed visit from Mike Cahill, manager
of East Sussex County Council’s Discretionary Support Scheme (a service of last
resort for people literally on the breadline). He’s possibly the perfect person
to ask: Why are more and more people having to resort to emergency help with
food?

“The biggest cause we’re seeing is people having
their benefits messed around with, the biggest by miles. Since October, when
they started sanctioning more people’s benefits, the demand has just jumped
up.”

Why would authorities choose to sanction the
benefits of people who have little or nothing to fall back on?

“The biggest reason given is people apparently not
attending medicals with Atos, even though some of these people are housebound
and cannot attend, [in which cases] Atos have said, ‘OK, well, we’ll send
someone to you’, but then their benefits get stopped anyway. Or they have
turned up [for a medical] and there’s no one there, and their benefits are
stopped anyway. It’s shocking. They seem to have got a whole lot stricter.”

Mike explains that he has seen a surge in people
having welfare payments stopped at short notice for no legitimate reason and
then having to wait days or even weeks to get the decision overturned –
meanwhile unable to make ends meet. He has also seen an increase in claimants
with ill health being told they must sign on for Jobseeker’s Allowance and seek
work – even though who are blatantly too unwell to do so.

“There was one person who had a lung problem where
he couldn’t lie down. If he lay down, he was going to die. He had to sleep
sitting up. And they told him he was fit for work, and they stopped his money.”

At the same time, council support services are
falling victim to ongoing budget cuts; funding allocated to Mike’s own scheme,
which was £1.2m for the current year, is being slashed to zero from next April.
And his scheme is one of the luckier ones. “East Sussex County Council is doing
what they can to keep it going and trying to find the funds elsewhere, but
across the country it’s going to have a massive impact.”

Mike tells me he has worked in welfare provision
for more than 20 years. Are these the most pernicious reforms he has seen
implemented?

“Oh yes, by miles. Most changes that have happened
in that 20 years, they sort of make sense. Jobseeker’s Allowance, for example,
makes sense [in principle]... Tax credits, yeah, maybe. Now, though, [payments]
just seem to be cut – without thinking about the effect it will have.” And the
system for claimants may be about to get even more bewildering. “Universal
credit is coming, and in theory it’s logical, but rolling up benefits into a
monthly payment including the housing benefit that would have been going
[directly] to the landlord, that’s going to get very confusing for
people.”

Tuesday, 1 April 2014

In
1984 Britain was a global force in marathon running, complete with the
world record and an Olympic medal. Now, 30 years later, we pin all our
hopes on one man who’s yet to make his debut. What went wrong, and can
we ever return our winning ways?

When
Mo Farah toes the start line of the 2014 Virgin London Marathon, the
buzz of expectation surrounding him will be electric. His thousands of
home supporters – the Union flag-waving, moboting multitudes – will line
the capital’s streets in frenetic anticipation. We have been waiting a
very long time. Twenty-one years have passed since a British man last
won the London Marathon: Eamonn Martin in 1993. A whole generation of
Britons have grown up never witnessing a fellow countryman break the
tape, not just in London, but in any world-class marathon. Could the
wait finally be over?

London
will be Farah’s debut marathon, just as it was for Martin in 1993, but
the challenge facing Mo is vastly different. Martin, 34 at the time and a
former Commonwealth 10,000m champion, out-kicked Mexican Isidro Rico to clinch victory on Westminster Bridge in 2:10:50. Taking nothing away
from Martin’s achievement, his winning time was the slowest since the
inaugural race in 1981, and is six minutes 10 seconds outside the
current course record, set by Emmanuel Mutai in 2011. In distance terms,
that’s a gap of more than 2km. The Kenyan averaged an astounding 4:45
per mile and covered the decisive 10km split from 30km to 40km in 28:45
(4:38 per mile) – faster than any British man ran for 10k last year.

With
the exception of the 2013 race, which was unusually poorly paced, the
slowest winning time in London over the past six years was 2:05:19 in
2010. That’s nearly two minutes faster than Steve Jones’s 28-year-old
British record. Can we really expect Farah to win on his first attempt?
His Olympic medals are solid (gold) proof that he has the talent, the
outright speed and the guts – plus, he holds the UK half-marathon record
of 60:59. But does he have the even deeper store of endurance needed to
hang with the leaders over 26.2 miles, covering their inevitable brutal
surges before outkicking them to victory? Bear in mind, he will have to
sustain sub-2:06 pace (4:48 per mile) – 10 seconds per mile faster than
Martin in 1993 – just to be in with a chance.

We’ve
every reason to feel optimistic for Mo; after all, the form-book deems
him the best distance runner in the world. Yes, a British runner is the
best in the world – well worth repeating. But, as gratifying as that is,
it raises an awkward question: does Farah’s ascent to the top herald
the UK’s return to the front of the pack in world-class marathon
running? Sadly, the answer is a resounding no. Farah is an exception, a
freakishly fast outlier, vastly more successful than all his British
contemporaries. The same was true of Paula Radcliffe, whose 2:15:25
world record from 2003 remains nearly three minutes ahead of the
second-fastest-ever woman, and an astonishing 7:47 quicker than the
next-fastest British female.

The
story of British marathon running over the past 30 years is one of
bottom-up decline, where only the very top has defied the trend. Paula’s
achievements – and Mo’s potential – distract us from the dire reality,
which is that no other British marathoners, male or female, are getting
anywhere near world-class standard. Our fastest man in 2013 ran 2:15:04 –
nearly 12 minutes adrift of the world lead (Wilson Kipsang’s new world
record of 2:03:23), while our fastest woman clocked 2:30:46 – 10 minutes
wide of the world-leading mark and some 15 minutes slower than Paula’s
world record. Britain’s prospects beyond Mo are quite literally too few
to mention.

It
was not always thus. Thirty years ago, Britain was arguably the best
marathon-running nation in the world, with not only star performers but a
huge depth of talent too. In 1984, no fewer than 75 men broke the 2:20
mark, and the hundredth-fastest man that year clocked a speedy (by
today’s standards) 2:21:32. These days we’re lucky if a dozen men break
2:20 each year, having hit a low point of just five in 2007, when the
hundredth-fastest man clocked a very modest 2:37:14. The extent of the
decline is startling and disconcerting – especially when you consider
how over the same period UK marathon running, in terms of sheer numbers,
has grown spectacularly. So what’s going on?

I
decided to seek out and draw together, within my home county of Sussex,
two people who together should be able to shed some light on what has
changed: the county’s fastest marathoner from then, Derek Stevens, who
ran 2:12:41 in 1984, and our fastest now, Jon Pepper, who clocked
2:19:10 in October 2013. Derek’s PB would easily top the UK rankings
today, but in 1984 it was only good enough for eighth spot. Jon’s best
put him 11th in the UK rankings last year, so his and Derek’s fastest
marathons are of equivalent merit relative to the standard of their day.
Equivalent yet separated by six and a half minutes – more than a mile
of running. How to account for this generational slowdown? Or, more
bluntly, why can’t Brits keep up in marathons anymore?

***

Derek
is now 59, recently retired from a senior position in local government and runs only
occasionally to keep fit; Jon is 25 and squeezes in twice-daily
training around his full-time job as a school science technician. The
three of us meet at Lewes athletics track and take our seats for a
roundtable discussion in the upstairs of the club-house overlooking the
home straight.

Derek Stevens (PB 2:12:41, set in 1984) and Jon Pepper (PB 2:19:10, set in 2013)

I
begin by quoting Charlie Spedding – whose 2:08:33 from 1985 still
stands as the English record – from an interview in the Independent
where he is responding to the question, why is British distance running
in decline?

“There’s
not one straightforward, simple answer. There are several factors.”
Spedding lists the ones he thinks are most significant. “Children are
not as active as they were 40 or 50 years ago… Teenagers [nowadays] see
people running in fancy dress or trying to lose weight [rather than] as a
serious sport. It’s just not seen as a cool thing for teenagers to be
involved in.”

Derek
is nodding eagerly. “Charlie is right. When I was six or seven years
old [in 1960-61], I was running more than a lot of the athletes today
run. It was play. We used to run and cycle everywhere. Televisions were
still black and white. I think my generation was fundamentally just so
much fitter by the time we got to secondary school.”

“I
definitely agree with that,” Jon says. “I’ve worked in schools since
graduating, and I can’t imagine kids being any less fit [than they are
now]… I’ll do a lap of the field as a warm-up and I’ll find only one out
of 30 can do it without stopping.”

The
suspicion that children have become less fit is backed up by strong and
mounting scientific research. A recent study undertaken by the American
Heart Association involving millions of children of various
nationalities found that on average nine-to-17-year-olds today run 90
seconds per mile slower than their counterparts did 30 years ago –
representing a decline in cardiovascular fitness of five per cent per
decade since 1975.

And
children who are generally less active are naturally less inclined to
get involved in a physically demanding sport like running. Jon sums up
the catch-22 situation:

“If
your level of fitness is low, why the hell would you want to go and
run? It’s horrible when you’re unfit! You can’t really blame them.”

Childhood
activity not only lays the physical foundations for distance running,
it also triggers the urge to compete, often in response to a direct or
perceived challenge thrown down by a rival or role model. Consider this
classic example from Derek:

“Our
school’s sports field was half a mile up a track. We had this cocky
teacher – I was only 11 – and he said, ‘I’ll give anyone a shilling if
they can beat me up to the field’. And I beat him!” His eyes sparkle as
he recalls this seminal victory – the satisfaction is still there,
undimmed over the decades.

Jon quizzes Derek on how to nail 26.2 Eighties-style

In
Derek’s heyday, he and others like him had an abundance of role models
to follow: world-beating marathoners like Jones and Spedding, not to
mention track icons like Seb Coe and Steve Ovett. At regional level too,
there were more runners competing at a higher standard, and most clubs
had at least one or two admired high-achievers. Derek’s first club
Bexhill AC counted among its members one of Britain’s all-time greats,
Dave Bedford. “It was a great moment for me, as a 12-year-old, to be
running with the man who was then the best in the world over 10k.”
Later, Derek joined Hastings AC and often travelled to other Sussex
clubs to train among the best in the county. “You need to seek groups
out,” he advises Jon. “I used to come over [to Brighton] and run with
Ovett and Mark Rowland [who still holds the UK record for the 3,000m
steeplechase], and knew I’d get hammered! But you need to do that.”

Derek: "I'd train with Ovett and get hammered!"

Jon’s
first club was Enfield and Haringey, and, like Derek, he was inspired
by the man at the front in training. “The top guy in our group was a guy
called Andy Coleman, whose highlight was coming second in the Great
North Run [in 2000]. He ran 62 minutes and nearly won it and was on TV.”
Witnessing his club-mate perform so well in a prestigious race clearly
had a huge impact. “Seeing that, it makes it very real to you, and I was
never looking back then because I realised I could do that. Without
that, who knows; it could have just petered out for me. That was
massive.”

But
unlike Derek and his peers, Jon’s generation has never witnessed
first-hand fellow countrymen winning world-class marathons. Instead, Jon
has admired the stars of Derek’s era in hindsight by poring over
historic results and becoming a self-confessed “running anorak”. “It
seems quite distant,” he admits. “Like something that’s not that real
because you’ve never seen a Briton run that fast.” Indeed, it was not a
Briton but a Kenyan, Sammy Wanjiru – winner of Olympic gold in Beijing
aged just 22 – who inspired Jon to step up to the marathon while still
in his early 20s.

Enchantment
with East African runners is nothing new, of course – Derek reveals
that his boyhood hero was Abebe Bikila, Ethiopian winner of the Olympic
Marathon in 1960 and 1964 – but the competitive balance has dramatically
shifted. Last year alone, East African runners racked up over 130
sub-2:10 performances, whereas not a single Briton has run that fast
since 2005. Have would-be British contenders been put off by what seems
like unbeatable opposition?

“No,”
says Jon. “It should still be a motivating factor to be the best in
Britain.” He flatly rejects the notion that upcoming athletes like him
are put off or held back through drawing international comparisons. “It
must be something within the British running scene that’s the problem.”

Derek
agrees. “It wouldn’t worry me that the East Africans are so good,
because I’d want to be the best in Sussex and the best domestically.”

Former
world cross-country runner-up Tim Hutchings’ diagnosis is that
Britain’s best runners no longer race against one another often enough.
Derek broadly supports this theory, though he emphasises that his
marathon preparation always took precedence over interim races. “I’d
race five or six times within a 16-week schedule, sometimes racing off
100 miles a week.”

Jon
takes a different approach, preferring to taper for tune-up races
rather than sustaining a high volume; he believes structured preparation
with specific efforts works better for him than constant hard training
with frequent racing on top.

Derek won the Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, on 16th June 1984, clocking 2:12:41

As
regards the particulars of training, then versus now, it’s striking how
little has changed – despite presumed advances in sports science.
Derek’s regime was based on Arthur Lydiard’s time-honoured principles: a
periodised plan with base-building, strength and anaerobic phases, and
high overall volume.

“I
could always train really hard. Three intense sessions [each week], and
good distance stuff, at a good pace… Over the 16-week build-up, I would
average 95-100 miles a week.”

Jon
has had more injuries to deal with, so his training log reveals more
recovery days between intense sessions and slightly lower overall
mileage. Even so, his and Derek’s training plans are fundamentally
similar, and I doubt that picking apart the minor differences would
yield any telling insight.

The
fact is, Jon and Derek are of the same athletic breed – dedicated,
disciplined and fiercely competitive – but it’s a breed that has become
vanishingly rare. Which is the crux of the problem. Marathoning success
is a numbers game; each nation needs a critical mass of its population
to start young and build a strong aerobic base before undertaking
several years of hard, consistent training. Far fewer Britons are doing
that now, and among the tiny number who are, ‘excellence’ is defined in
relation to one another, so the decline is self-perpetuating.

“I
guess it’s easier now for someone like me to say I’ll try to run 2:18
or 2:16 [rather than a world-class time],” admits Jon, “because I’ll
still be one of the best in the country and that’ll be all right.”
You cannot blame him; reaching sub-2:20 standard requires enormous
commitment - why push even harder when you’re already the best in your
region and one of the best in the country?

Clipping from 1984 notes how Derek's achievements are hardly noticed by the press

The root of the problem lies not within UK running but around and beyond it. British leisure culture has evolved along the lines of ‘the survival of the unfittest’; with the introduction of new technology and gadgets, sedentary amusements have replaced outdoor play. British youngsters while away their spare time socialising, shopping, or in front of screens, tweeting, texting, gaming – and putting on weight while their aerobic potential withers. Meanwhile, Kenyan kids are outdoors being physically active for as much as 3.5 hours every day – while dreaming of emulating their champion compatriots. It’s no wonder we’re lagging so far behind.

Can
Britain return to aerobic health and fall back in love with competitive
marathon running? There are glimmers of hope; at last November's Leeds Abbey Dash 10k, the top 82 runners finished inside 32 minutes – a greater
depth of quality than had been seen in recent years. A reinvigorated
domestic road running scene is a must if we are to revive a culture of
competitiveness and draw in new talent. Standards have slipped back a
long way, but a turnaround isn’t impossible. Mo Farah’s Olympic success
lifted the limit on our dreams by proving that Britons can still reach
the top; who knows what competitive hunger he can reawaken if he makes
his mark over 26.2.

Alternative theories for the decline

1980s, Derek Stevens

2010s, Jon Pepper

‘Trainers have become overly cushioned and heavy’

“I used to run in a pair of Tiger Cubs, which had no sole to them. It does make you wonder.”

“I’m dead against thick-soled, very cushioned shoes. We weren’t born with half an inch of rubber under our heels!”

‘Athletes aren’t as competitive anymore’

“I was quite ruthless to other athletes. I’ve been in fights in races before. It could be quite cruel.”

“Losing really does piss me off. If I’m really up for a race, I’ll talk it up in my mind to beat someone”

‘Football has become too popular, too dominant’

“That hasn’t changed. Back in the Eighties, we even had quite a good national team.”

“Aged 11-12, I was really into football but my team was awful. We lost regularly with double-figure scores!”

‘There isn’t a big enough financial incentive’

“It’s no different. The appearance and prize money in the Eighties was minimal. It was never a motivation, only a bonus.”

“I
don’t think anyone who’s a distance runner [in the UK] these days is
doing it for the money. If they were, they’d be an idiot!”

Going back to go forward

Super-ambitious
Michael Crawley, 26, decided to follow a training schedule from the
1980s in an attempt to emulate the success of his coach

Mike Crawley has made huge progress since following
his coach's schedule from the early-Eighties

"At
the beginning of 2013, I persuaded my coach to lend me his training
diaries from 1981 and 1982 (when he ran a marathon best of 2:14). My
intention was to compare my training with his every week, using his
schedule as a template to build towards.

"The
diaries are heavy on numbers (9,037 miles, to be precise) and light on
description. By far the most frequently used adjective is “tired”, with
only occasional elaboration (“tired, knackered actually” or “eight miles
hard, 5.30am”). The sparseness of words on the page is a reminder of
how simple training really is; it involves, principally, a lot of
running.

"The
entry on 7th August, 1981, reads: “10 miles inc. 29mins 53.6secs for
10,000m (22nd), good.” Two days later: “22 miles alone – tired.” The
near-constant tiredness was getting him somewhere, then. In how many
races in Britain today would you expect to break 30 minutes for 10km and
finish outside of the top 20? (answer: none).

"After
I ran 50mins 52secs for 10 miles, in September, and finished second,
feeling quite pleased with myself, I found an entry where my coach had
run 50mins flat and finished outside the top five. I re-evaluated what
constituted good running.

"Since
then, I’ve built up my mileage to 100 miles most weeks, and run as many
as 110 on a few occasions. The change is probably best summed up in
‘more running, less worrying.’ I threw away my GPS and heart-rate
monitor and threw a decent chunk of caution to the wind. I stopped doing
easy runs unless I was really knackered, and core stability didn’t
exist in 1981, so that went too.

"One
session that particularly stands out involves running a set distance
(usually four miles) flat-out in the morning, then doing it again in the
evening, on the same course, and trying to go faster on tired legs.
This isn’t ‘tempo’ or ‘threshold’ running – those terms didn’t exist 30
years ago. It’s just called ‘hard’, and it is.

"I
realised early on that I wasn’t going to be able to replicate every
week of my coach’s training, but after five months my training diary is
looking a lot more like his. It now contains what he calls ‘proper’
training, and I’ve got faster – by 1min 20secs over a half marathon (new
PB, 66.52) and 50secs over 10km (new PB, 30.03).

"So
it turns out that training like runners did in the Eighties isn’t very
scientific, is often hard and very tiring, but it works!"

What is the single biggest cause of the decline in British marathon running since the Eighties?

“Modern, overprotective society. Kids are aerobic monsters and need to be let loose at every opportunity when young!”

Jon
Brown, former European Cross Country champion (1996) & twice fourth
in the Olympic Marathon (2000, 2004), with a 2:09:31 marathon PB (2005)

“Secular
trends in physical activity are primarily responsible for the general
demise in physical fitness, which in turn has had a devastating effect
on sporting performance. School and university sports, now almost
extinct in the UK in comparison to other countries, have done very
little to reverse this general demise in physical fitness with dire
consequences for health and sporting performance.”

Yannis Pitsiladis, Professor of Sport and Exercise Science at the University of Brighton

UK male marathon times 1980-2010 comparison

1st 10th 20th 50th 100th

2010 2:13:40 2:18:21 2:22:49 2:28:20 2:33:06

2005 2:09:31 2:18:47 2:24:02 2:29:49 2:35:20

2000 2:11:17 2:18:49 2:22:47 2:28:39 2:34:09

1995 2:10:31 2:15:02 2:20:17 2:24:57 2:29:57

1990 2:10:10 2:16:03 2:18:57 2:23:01 2:27:50

1985 2:07:13 2:14:20 2:15:31 2:18:34 2:21:31

1980 2:11:22 2:16:04 2:17:52 2:21:11 2:26:25

Top 10 UK marathons: now versus then

2013

1 2:15:04 Nicholas Torry

2 2:15:21 Dave Webb

3 2:15:52 Ben Moreau

4 2:16:50 Derek Hawkins

4 2:16:50 Craig Hopkins

6 2:17:43 John Gilbert

7 2:18:28 Ross Houston

8 2:18:50 Paul Martelletti

9 2:19:01 James Kelly

10 2:19:07 Phil Wicks

(11 2:19:10 Jon Pepper)

1984

1 2:08:05 Steve Jones

2 2:09:57 Charlie Spedding

3 2:10:08 Geoff Smith

4 2:11:41 Kevin Forster

5 2:11:49 Fraser Clyne

6 2:11:54 Hugh Jones

7 2:12:12 Dennis Fowles

8 2:12:41 Derek Stevens

9 2:13:24 Martin McCarthy

10 2:13:49 Jimmy Ashworth

Author's note

My
own marathon PB of 2:28:46, set in 2012, snuck inside the UK top 50
that year, a fact that I'd been tempted to regard as boast-worthy. During the
writing of this feature, my ego trip was brought to a crashing halt when I discovered that, had I been running in the mid-Eighties, my time wouldn't have
made the top 300!

Sunday, 6 October 2013

Also published on HuffingtonPost.co.uk here:http://huff.to/19ePKsIA notice on the wall of my GP’s surgery reads, “Do not discuss more than one problem per appointment. Remember, you are allotted only 10 minutes.”It was a message reiterated to my dad during a consultation in early 2011 when he mentioned a second concern: a lump on his head. The primary concern was a larger, as-yet-undiagnosed lump on his shoulder.

“This is a 10-minute appointment,” the GP said firmly. The implication was clear: he didn’t have time to look at the growth on my dad’s head.Three months later, Dad was dead. The lumps were cancer that had spread from his lungs.

I’m not blaming the GP for my dad’s death. The cancer had metastasised and there’s little chance it could have been halted by swifter medical intervention. I am not blaming; I am asking: when did GPs run out of time for their patients? What changed?

You don’t need to know much about biology to realise that the body is a holistic system: the component tissues and organs interact and affect each other. It’s not uncommon for a symptom in one part to be traced to a root cause in another.

We rely on GPs to be crack detectives of physiology, seeking out as many clues as possible to home in on the underlying malady. Our lives are in their hands, and that shouldn’t be an unsettling thought.For many of us, it takes guts to book an appointment and tell a stranger about our worries. (Not to mention the added stress of negotiating time off work, etc.) We’re often scared, especially if we fear it might be something serious. We also worry that we’re wasting the doctor’s time, even when we know deep down something is wrong. We’re easily put off by brusque treatment, made to feel feeble and even more apprehensive; next time something hurts, we think twice before seeking advice.

A detective wouldn’t cut short a witness: “Stop blathering about the colour of his clothes and cut to the bit where he pulls the trigger.” So why does a GP in pursuit of diagnostic pointers discourage a patient from describing fully their concerns?

Yes, I know time is money (a GP’s time, lots of money) and money is limited. I know too that some people waste GPs’ time with untreatable sniffles etc, but that can’t be helped except through patient (in both senses of the word) education. If the system is buckling, let’s at least take notice and fight to save it. Institutional cursoriness isn’t a solution, it’s surrender.

PostscriptI’m a sniffling time-waster, perhaps: there’s probably nothing seriously wrong with me, but a couple of times lately while running my heart rate has leapt up to 220bpm. My usual ‘maximum’ is 185bpm. It didn’t hurt but I felt a flutter in my chest and running suddenly felt harder. The first time it happened I wrote it off as a one-off glitch and did nothing; the second time, I figured I should get checked.

The GP referred me to the practice nurse for an ECG, which came back as abnormal. The length of time between the electrical signal telling my heart to finish a beat and the beginning of the next one, to start the next beat, is longer than it should be. Having an over-long QT interval is associated with dropping dead while playing sport.

“I want some advice from a cardiologist on this,” said my GP. “We ought to get an answer quite swiftly, so I’ll have a fax sent today. In the meantime, don’t push too hard.”

That was a fortnight ago. I’ve heard nothing. I phoned the GP’s surgery and the receptionist told me to contact the hospital cardiology department directly. So I rang the hospital, and was told that the relevant paperwork would be impossible to find unless I knew the name of the consultant to whom the fax had been sent.

“Which consultant was the fax sent to?” I asked the GP’s receptionist.“We never specify a consultant, we just send it to the department.” “But… But please, I don’t know what else to do.” “Well, I shouldn’t be doing all this chasing-up. We’ve been told not to. We don’t have time,” she huffed, before reluctantly agreeing to resend the fax. “Try calling us next Monday to see if we’re heard back.” She didn’t sound confident.

I don’t feel entitled to urgent attention; I suspect my heart is OK – I’ve been running for years and I figure that if my ticker were going to fall fatally out of rhythm, it would have done so before now. Even so, what if there were a serious risk? What if I did have a timebomb in my chest? Would the NHS have the time to tell me? Who knows.